Essay: Does Mexico need a daily in English?

Here, with the slightest of modifications, is a thought piece that ran in the final edition of The Herald Mexico on May 31. Let it serve as a partial mission statement for Mexicalpan:

Does Mexico need an English-language newspaper?
By Kelly Arthur Garrett

There have been previous lulls in the availability of quality English-language journalism in Mexico.

During a recent one, early in 2003, I suggested to a small gathering of idle reporter/editor types that the "need" they kept harping on for a newspaper in English was more self-serving than anything else.

Why does Mexico need an English-language daily, I asked them. How is it in the national interest to create employment for us ink-stained wretches, mostly foreign ones at that?

The idea was to open a discussion via some pointed razzing. As it turns out, the questions, properly examined, can produce some meaningful answers.

And those answers have more to do with what´s good for Mexico than what's good for a handful of whatever itinerant news-smiths happen to be in the country at the moment.

The most obvious answer is also a very good one. There are upwards of 500,000 permanent residents in Mexico born in Anglophone countries.

The number could be much larger than that, perhaps in the millions. Nobody´s quite sure. Whatever the English-speaking population here is, it's small compared to what it´s going to be in the next decade or so.

Factor in other foreign-born transplants whose second language is English rather than Spanish, along with the tourists and other visitors who like to know what´s going on while they're here, and you've likely got tens of millions of people in Mexico who want and deserve a newspaper they can read.

And there are countless millions more living outside of Mexico with a special interest in news about Mexico from Mexico who will access the product on the Internet.

But as valuable as it is, providing this service to a large minority of the population is only part of the story. A newspaper in English brings not just a different language to Mexican journalism, but a different style as well.

True, Mexican readers are already blessed with an honest-to-goodness choice among daily papers. Could any two publications differ more radically in approach than Reforma and La Jornada? But the only thing better than choice is more choice.

The English-language style, especially in the U.S. tradition, expands the menu in Mexico. It offers a greater emphasis on context, readability and economy of prose.

Whether that's better or not is a subjective judgment. But it's certainly different. This alternative style has been appreciated by some bilingual native-born Mexicans, and could be appreciated by a lot more with a minimum outreach effort.

There's a third raison d´etre that I think outweighs the others. It has to do with perspective.

A Mexican English-language newspaper offers something that no other written news source can - information in English about Mexico that´s produced in Mexico from a Mexican perspective. That grounding is - or at least should be - such a newspaper's defining characteristic.

It contrasts markedly with foreign news reporting about Mexico. Though often quite good, that coverage is necessarily pre-selected and configured for external consumption, not to mention filtered through assumptions about what matters to readers in the publication's home country.

That process inevitably influences the news presentation. And, it must be said, it often distorts the information.

You end up getting a lot of round Mexican pegs being forced through square U.S. holes.
With a Mexico-produced English-language newspaper, on the other hand, Spanish-challenged foreign-born residents have access to information about what's going on around them, a way to understand the reality of the nation they live in on its own terms. Their lives are thus enriched. And the nation as a whole also benefits, because they become more responsible residents and more productive participants in public life.

Whether the next English-language newspaper in Mexico adheres to the above ideals remains to be seen. In the commentary, criticism and news reports I've contributed to The Herald Mexico over the last several years, I've tried to respect them.

I've also tried to understand what's happening without resorting to the predetermined "facts" about this country, the accepted "truths" that "everybody knows." And I've tried to make sense out of the shouting and silences here without applying imported value judgments - but also without abandoning my own core beliefs about right and wrong.

Those are tricky little dances, believe me. I'll leave it to others may judge how well they were performed. I do know that I'm not planning on stopping any time soon.